Editorial 2021

Welcome (Fig. 1) to Volume 54 of the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology (QJEGH), the first to be published online only, after 53 years of printed copies and 20 years of publishing both versions. While some readers will undoubtedly miss the familiar blue volume dropping through the letterbox, the move to online only for all Geological Society journals is more sustainable, environmentally friendly and allows continuous publication, thus avoiding the current backlog of online first articles. This change is fitting and forward looking, as 2022 will be the Geological Society’s Year of Sustainability, following the Year of Space in 2021. Geoscientists have an important role to play in a sustainable low-carbon future, through developing renewable geothermal energy resources, managing risks of spent nuclear fuels, and carbon mitigation measures such as carbon capture and sequestration (e.g. Younger 2013; Brabham et al. 2019; Patton et al. 2019). For engineeringand hydrogeologists, inclusion of sustainability into projects has become increasingly common in recent years (Bardos et al. 2011, 2018), and the launch of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015 provided added impetus to drive transformational change to meet the targets of the 17 SDGs. Of particular relevance to QJEGH are SDG6 Clean Water and Sanitation, SDG7 Affordable Clean Energy, SDG9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, SDG11 Sustainable cities and communities and SDG13 Climate Action. Inherent in the SDGs, although not a specific goal, is pollution. Soil and groundwater contamination are very much within the scope of QJEGH and the focus of this year’s editorial by Jonathan Smith, (Fig. 2) Assistant Scientific Editor for Hydrogeology. Soil and groundwater contamination can pose potential risks to human health, ecology and the wider environment, hinder the beneficial re-use of land, and create legal and reputational issues for those responsible. Government policies have been developed around the world since widespread recognition of the issue in the latter part of the twentieth century. These policies reflect societal expectations, cultural norms, scientific understanding, and the degree of public outrage about contamination events in a country. Such outrage is typically associated with catastrophic and highprofile events, such as those at Love Canal (USA) and Lekkerkerk (The Netherlands). When public concern was raised by very serious events, the political response was often to develop a policy that required removal of all the contamination, and to restore the site to pristine conditions. In other situations, a more pragmatic fit-for-use approach was adopted, where the presence of residual contamination was tolerated, provided that the land posed no unacceptable risk to human health or the environment, and did not unduly constrain the future beneficial use of the land. A generalised evolution of contaminated land management since the 1950s is illustrated in Figure 3. The timing of this process varied across the world, and some societies jumped straight to later stages, having recognised the importance of the issue later, but able to draw on international experience to speed their policy development. Figure 3 also illustrates the technical awareness, political response and land management solutions associated with each step. The latest developments in this evolution are in the field of sustainable remediation (e.g. CL:AIRE 2010; Bardos et al. 2011; ISO 2017). Sustainable remediation principles require that unacceptable risks to human health and the environment are